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The Cold Squad's basement work area was dominated by a large table in the center of the space. Near it presided a free-standing cork board on which photos had been pinned -- this was where the evidence from the current case was evaluated. Around this stood the several desks of the individual Cold Squad members. Off to one side, beyond the staircase, lay an alcove containing metal shelves filled with the cardboard boxes that housed the old case files. Sergeant McCormick's colleagues were milling around the worktable, peering at the bulletin board. Mulder could now see that the photos were of a familiarly-dispatched decapitated corpse. "These are my people," the Sergeant said. She pointed to a balding fiftyish man, medium height with a body that had once been athletic but was now going to pot. He had white hair and a white mustache. "This is Tony Logozzo." The other man in the room was young enough to be his son. He was tall, well-built, but with a face that was too handsome and square-jawed -- like a cartoon superhero. He had a really silly-looking pompadour hairdo. (Mulder dubbed him "Hair Boy.") "That's Eddie Carson." The group was rounded out by an attractive olive-skinned woman, with dark brown eyes and black curly hair tied in a ponytail. "That's Jackie Cortez." "So, Sergeant," Schanke asked, "What exactly have you got?" Mulder sat at the work table and opened his laptop as McCormick stood by the bulletin board, like a teacher. "Our unsolved beheading dates to 1962," she said. "The MO is just like your more recent case. It took place on Ward's Island. That's one of the islands out on the lake; you can see it from Harbourfront. A freak electrical storm was seen from the harbour one night, and this body was found near a summer house, which had suffered exterior blast damage. The head was removed cleanly with a sharp blade." "Sounds familiar all right," Schanke assented. "Were they able to perform an autopsy?" Scully asked. McCormick pursed her lips and shook her head. "The body was stolen from the morgue that very night." "Damn!" Mulder exclaimed. "What is it with these people?" McCormick jumped in. "Agent Mulder, I'll have you know, we don't need a body to solve these cases." "Oh, yeah!" Logozzo said, in a thick Canadian accent. "Remember that case we did a while ago -- talk about yer habeas corpus -- we didn't have a body, all we had was a dress with some blood stains on it! It was habeas dressus!" "Hey," Cortez put in, "wasn't that the case where it turned out the victim was a hermaphrodite, whose body had been dissected at the Medical Center?" Eddie Carson (a.k.a. Hair Boy) nodded grimly. "Yeah -- we found his...uh, her...uh, private parts in a jar still preserved there..." "Isn't that special," Schanke said, grimacing. Knight remained strangely quiet. "Do you have any evidence from the scene of the crime?" Scully asked. "We do have finger prints from the scene," McCormick replied. "But they never found a match in any known databases. At least, not when the file was hot." "Hmm..." Mulder said. "I have fingerprints from our current case scanned into the laptop. Give me what you've got." McCormick nodded to Cortez, who handed him the fingerprint sheet. Mulder (extremely high-tech equipped that day) produced a hand-held scanner and entered the prints into the computer. A few seconds later, a most astonishing result came up. "Holy shit," muttered the FBI Agent. "I have a perfect match." Scully ran over to look over his shoulder. "Whoa..." she said incredulously. "What?" Carson asked. "The prints..." Scully said. "They match...Klossenfeffer's!" "But that's bizarre," Schanke said. "That guy Klossenfeffer -- Natalie estimated his age at about 35. He couldn't have even been born in 1962!" "Wait, wait, wait..." Cortez said impatiently, pacing about the room. "Lemme think...Ali, what are the odds of two total strangers having the same fingerprints?" "Astronomical," McCormick replied. Hair Boy said, "So astronomical, Stephen Hawking couldn't calculate them." "What about relatives?" Cortez asked. "They'd have to be identical twins," Scully said. "They'd be the same age." Mulder stared at the screen. "Clones," he pronounced. Scully sighed. "Clones, Mulder?" "We've met clones before!" Scully rolled her eyes, crossed her arms, and slowly moved away from Mulder. "Or, maybe he's like that Eugene Tooms guy!" Mulder said. Scully countered, "Then these murders would be happening at regular intervals and the livers would be missing." "Huh?" Logozzo asked. "Long story," Mulder replied. Eddie Carson ventured, "Maybe that guy you're talking about -- Klossenfeffer -- maybe he's not as young as he looks." "He'd have to be in his late fifties, at least!" Scully retorted. "I saw that corpse -- it was not in its late fifties." Just then, a newcomer came down the stairs. Mulder turned to see a young woman, with merry dark eyes and dark hair, a pixie-ish face with a generous, but well- proportioned nose. She was very cute, Mulder thought. She wore a simple beige sweater and skirt, and carried a box of donuts. "This is Jill Stone, our profiler," Sergeant McCormick said. "Ah," Logozzo intoned, "You bring us donuts! God Bless you!" "Ooh, Donuts," said Schanke, and went over to her, looking hopefully into the box. "Jill," McCormick asked, "do you have a profile on this case for us?" Jill, giving up the donuts to the two admiring and hungry detectives, came over. "It's all very anomalous, if you ask me. There's definitely more than one perpetrator at work, but the murders have a compulsive, ritualistic quality. The stealing of the corpses suggest that somehow the killers want to retain a memento of their crime..." "Wait till you hear the whopper we just uncovered," Cortez told Jill. She explained the fingerprint match that didn't make any sense. "Eh?" the profiler said. "Are you sure there isn't some kind of problem with the prints? Or your computer?" Mulder shook his head. "This stuff is state-of-the-art. The Lone Gunmen got it for me." Scully gave Jill a "don't ask, it's a long story," look. "Let's take this one fact at a time," McCormick said, trying to wrestle order out of chaos. "Okay...He's not as old as he looks," Mulder said thoughtfully. "He was killed in a ritualistic way -- beheading...there wasn't enough blood at the scene..." There was a dramatic pause. "Vampires!" he shouted. "What!" Knight shouted back. Everyone was surprised -- he'd been so quiet, they'd all forgotten he was there. "Vampires!" Scully shouted back. "Oh, come on!" "Agent Mulder," Cortez said, "What are you smoking?" "And where can I get some?" Eddie the Hair Boy quipped, then shut up as Ali McCormick shot him a glare. Mulder held his ground. "Scully! You were with me in that town that was full of vampires! Listen -- beheading is one of the ways you kill one! It's a classic in Bram Stoker!" Jackie Cortez giggled. "But where's the stake through the heart!" she mocked. "Where's the garlic?" Knight, suddenly very agitated, began pacing around the room, laughing uneasily. "Agent Mulder, that is a very outré hypothesis." "It's not the weirdest stuff he's ever come up with," Scully groaned. "What about that fact that there's no blood, even though beheading would sever major arteries, huh?" Mulder rose, flushed with excitement. "Maybe the vampires suck the blood from their victims, then behead them to prevent them from becoming rival vampires!" "Agent Mulder," Schanke said around a mouthful of donuts, "With all due respect... you are totally nuts." Logozzo chuckled, "Sounds like a load of bullshit to me..." Jill Stone put up a hand. "Calm down, everyone. What if Agent Mulder is right -- but up to a point. What if this is a group of people who THINK they're vampires? There are a number of subcultural communities who claim they're vampires. Some alternative lifestyle groups are into ritualistic bloodletting for sexual purposes. This could be a cult or fringe group or something." "But wait -- there's more..." Mulder added. "The fact that these people have constructed identities, false papers....what if it's to hide their immortality?" "Mulder!" Scully cried in her usual exasperated fashion. "We already established that it's because they're linked to a ring of terrorists!" "A terrorist vampire cult?" Jill Stone stroked her chin. "Could be. Maybe the bloodletting and the beheadings are some kind of ritualistic social control mechanism -- like the finger amputations the Japanese yakuza use to control their members..." Scully turned gratefully to Jill. "You know, you could be onto something there." Sergeant McCormick shook her head. "I think this is out of our jurisdiction," she said. "I could try to get in on this case, but Ross would go for my head." "Getting Ross pissed off hasn't stopped you before," Logozzo said mildly, wiping donut jelly from the corner of his mouth. "That's true," McCormick assented, putting her hands in the pockets of her pantsuit jacket. "Look, we're conducting the current investigation," Knight said, apparently a little calmer than he had just been. "Why don't you see what you can dig up from this 1962 case, and keep us in the loop. We'll worry about the modern crisis." "Not much we can dig up," Cortez quipped. "Since we don't have a body." With a last-ditch effort, Mulder said, "With vampires, you're supposed to burn the body." Seeing Scully begin to draw breath for a tirade, Jill interjected, "If they're a cult that thinks they're vampires, they could be into that. Maybe they don't necessarily think they're vampires -- it could just be a metaphor they embrace." McCormick nodded. "It's a valid theory." "We still don't have an answer for the freaky thing with the fingerprints," Eddie the Hair Boy said. "Or what the deal is with those electrical storms, or bombs, or whatever the hell they are." "Well, we have nothing better to do for the rest of the evening," Scully said with a sigh. "We could stay here and go over your case files in more detail. Maybe there's some new piece we can add to the puzzle." "I can get more donuts," Jill offered. "Or we can order a pizza." Knight rolled his eyes. "I think you all have everything under control. Skank, I'm going out for some air." "You just want to get away from the pizza fumes, I know you," Schanke said affectionately. "But, you go on ahead. I'll catch you later. Tony and I can hang out here with the rest of the gang." Mulder sighed and sat back in his chair as he watched Nick Knight climb up and out of the Cold Squad area. Then his eyes widened in sudden realization. Knight! Of course....!
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